This article analyzes the role of mosques dedicated to the “father of the nation” under two personalistic authoritarian systems: Saparmurat Niyazov in Turkmenistan and Sheikh Zayed in the United Arab Emirates (uae). Critiquing “cult of personality” narratives as Orientalist and analytically weak, I emphasize the constructed nature of charisma, asking how such personalistic regimes produce the image of a coherent figurehead—and to what end. As a discursive device, the personalistic leader-as-icon appears in a range of authoritarian regimes, and it is materially inscribed in the symbolic landscapes to create the impression of unity among elites and the masses. To illustrate how this works, I draw on research in Turkmenistan and the uae from 2012 through 2014, including landscape analysis of two mosques memorializing the countries’ founding fathers: the Turkmenbashi Ruhy Mosque in the outskirts of Ashgabat, and the Sheikh Zayed Mosque, in the outskirts of Abu Dhabi.

Barbara GeddesParadigms and Sand Castles: Theory Building and Research Design in Comparative Politics (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press2003) 51. See for example Rico Isaacs and Sarah Whitmore “The Limited Agency and Life-Cycles of Personalized Dominant Parties in the Post-Soviet Space: The Cases of United Russia and Nur Otan” Democratization 21 no. 4 (2014): 699–721.

Simonetta Falasca-ZamponiFascist Spectacle: The Aesthetics of Power in Mussolini’s Italy (Berkeley: University of California Press1997). See also a special issue of the journal Modern Italy (1999 vol. 3 no. 2).

Koch“Security and Gendered National Identity in Uzbekistan”499–518; Natalie Koch “Is Nationalism Just for Nationals? Civic Nationalism for Noncitizens and Celebrating National Day in Qatar and the uae” Political Geography 54 (2016).

Bülent Batuman“Minarets without Mosques: Limits to the Urban Politics of Neo-Liberal Islamism,”Urban Studies50 no. 6 (May 2013): 1097–1113; Alev Çınar “Imagined Community as Urban Reality: The Making of Ankara” in Alev Çınar and Thomas Bender (eds.) Urban Imaginaries: Locating the Modern City (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press 2007) 151–181; Kyle Evered “Symbolizing a Modern Anatolia: Ankara as Capital in Turkey’s Early Republican Landscape” Comparative Studies of South Asia Africa and the Middle East 28 no. 2 (January 2008): 326–341; Duygu Kacar “Ankara a Small Town Transformed to a Nation’s Capital” Journal of Planning History 9 no. 1 (2010): 43–65.